Influența diadohiană asupra învățăturii duhovnicești a Sfântului Maxim Mărturisitorul
The Diadohian Influence on Spiritual Teaching of Saint Maximus the Confessor

Summary/Abstract: Diadochos, the bischop of Photike in Epeiros of Illyricum, is one of the most significant ascetical writers of the fifth century. He was born about 400 and died around 468 in North Africa, after being taken there in a Vandal raid. From his extant writings, it is seen that he was an adversary of the Monophysites and the Messalians. Of. The writings of Diadochos, the most important is his mystical, ascetical treatise, One Hundred Gnostic Chapiters. It is here that Diadochos presents a spiritual guide, a way to Christian perfection, that was to be used by some of the most important Fathers of the Christian East. Diadochus’s main purpose is severely practical, to provide a canon for discerning genuine Christian prayer and so his mothod is empirical and descriptive. It might be said that the is a phenomenologist before his time who. Language normally employed about physical sensation has been transposed to the order of spirit. Saint Maximus the Confessor is the master of synthesis and systematisation by virtue of his style of thinking rather than of his having produced a definitive summa of his thought. We know that he was familiar with the work of Diadochus and so that he would have appreciated the use of the phrase in its original context. My aim in study is merely to provide a distych in which the similarities and contrasts in the handling of this notion by both authores becomes apparent.

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